Tuesday, March 12, 2013

KRAUTROCK Melody Maker, July 1996

by Simon Reynolds

The way out sounds of Krautrock are currently way "in". The
evidence: a deluge of CD reissues, the publication of Julian Cope's
enthralling pocket-size handbook "Krautrocksampler", a comeback LP by
Faust, and a legion of contemporary bands, from Stereolab to Tortoise to
Mouse On Mars, pledging fealty in word and deed. There's even a
Krautrock club in London called Kosmische, which in turn inspired The
Face to run a piece--complete with comically contrived and completely
bogus photo-tableau of foxy young things grooving to Harmonia--on how
the hippest thing in modern music was a bunch of aged German hippies.

So why Krautrock, and why now? Maybe it's simply because
contemporary guitarpop on both sides of the Atlantic is unusually lame
and conservative, and Krautrock beckons as a beacon indicating just how
much can be done with the basic rock format of guitar, bass and drums.
Seizing the possibilities of the recording studio, the German kosmische
bands of the early '70s produced results as otherworldly and
rhythmically sophisticated as today's "sampladelic" music (techno, drum
& bass, hip hop, ambient etc). Today's Britpop and American
corporate grunge'n' punk are overtly pre-psychedelic and
anti-experimental, merging playsafe 1966-meets-1978 power-pop aesthetics
with radio-friendly production. Krautrock--as the missing link between
the tumult of the late '60s and the anti-rockist vanguard of 1979 (PiL
etc)--is therefore a crucial resource for any contemporary band who
resists the reductive notion that (pre-psych) Beatles + Buzzcocks *= the
Essence, the Way and the Truth, for Ever and Ever.

Immerse yourself in Krautrock--and this is the immersive, engulfing
music par excellence--and you'll find a paradox at the music's heart: a
combination of absolute freedom and absolute discipline. Krautrock is
where the over-reaching ambition and untethered freakitude of late '60s
acid rock is checked and galvanised by a proto-punk minimalism.
Krautrock bands like Can, Neu! and Faust unleashed music of immense
scale that miraculously avoided prog-rock's bombastics, its cult of
virtuosity-for-virtuosity's-sake. Where progressive rock boasted "look
at me, look how fast my fingers can go", Krautrock beseeched "look! look
how VAST we can go'. Or as Can's Michael Karoli put it: "We weren't
into impressing people, just caressing them'

Alongside Tim Buckley's "Starsailor", Miles Davis' circa"On The
Corner", Yoko Ono circa "Fly", Krautrock was true fusion, merging
psychedelic rock with funk groove, jazz improvisation, Stockhausen-style
avant-electronics and ethnic flava in a way that avoided the
self-congratulatory, dilettante eclecticism that marred even the best of
the '70s jazz-rock bands, like Weather Report. Krautrock's primary
inputs, and urgency, came from late '60s rock: Velvet Underground's
mesmerising mantras, Hendrix's pyrotechnique, Syd Barrett-era Pink
Floyd's chromatic chaos, plus dashes of West Coast folkadelic rock and
the studio-centric experiments of Brian Wilson and the later Beatles.
Equally significant is what they didn't draw on, namely the blues-bore
purism sired by Cream and the Stones.

Tweaking this Anglo-American legacy, the German bands added a vital
distance (coming to rock'n'roll as an alien import, they were able to
make it even more alien), and they infused it with a German character
that's instantly audible but hard to tag. A combination of Dada, LSD and
Zen resulted in a dry absurdist humour that could range from zany
tomfoolery to a sort of sublime nonchalance, a lightheaded but never
lighthearted ease of spirit. Although they occasionally dipped their
toes into psychedelia's darkside (the madness that claimed psychonauts
such as Syd Barrett, Roky Erikson or Moby Grape's Skip Spence), what's
striking about most Krautrock is how affirmative it is, even at its most
demented. This peculiar serene joy and aura of pantheistic celebration
is nowhere more evident than in the peak work of Can, Faust and Neu!

KRAUTROCK: THE CANON

If the triumvirate of Can/Faust/Neu! has gotten so cliched as a hip
reference point, it's for a good reason. Despite being quite dissimilar
and lacking any kind of fraternal, comradely feelings towards each
other, Can, Faust and Neu! are the unassailable centre of Krautrock's
pantheon-- its Dante/Shakespeare/Milton, or Beatles/Stones/Dylan, if you
will.

CAN's core was a quartet of lapsed avant-garde and free jazz
musicians (bassist Holger Czukay, guitarist Michael Karoli, keyboardist
Irmin Schmidt and drummer Jaki Leibezeit) who--blown away by the VU and
the Beatles' "I Am The Walrus"-- decided rock was where it was at. Can
were the most funky and improvisational of the Krautrock bands.
Recording in their own studio in a Cologne castle, they jammed all day,
then edited the juiciest chunks of improv into coherent compositions.
This was similar to the methodology used by Miles Davis and producer Teo
Macero. As Can's band's resident Macero, Czukay deployed two-track
recording and a handful of mikes to achieve wonders of proto-ambient
spatiality, shaming today's lo-fi bands. Can's early sound--spartan,
crisp-and-dry trance-rock, like the VU circa 'White Light' but with a
smokin' rhythm section--peaked with the 15 minute mindquake of "Mother
Sky". As the influence of James Brownian motion kicked in, Can began to
fuse 'head' and 'booty', atmosphere and groove, like nobody else save
Miles Davis. After the shamanic avant-funk of "Tago Mago" and the
brittle angst-funk of "Ege Bamyasi", Can's music plunged into the
sunshine with "Future Days", "Soon Over Babaluma" and "Landed", their
mid-'70s 'Gaia trilogy'. A kind of mystic materialism quivers and pulses
inside these ethnofunkadelic groovescapes and ambient oases, from the
moon-serenade "Come Sta, La Luna" to the fractal funk and chaos theorems
of "Chain Reaction/Quantum Physics". This is music that wordlessly but
eloquently rejoices in Mother Nature's bounty and beauty.

Despite an almost utter absence of input from black music, NEU! were
probably the closest to Can, in their sheer hypno-groove power and
shared belief that "restriction is the mother of invention" (Holger
Czukay's minimal-is-maximal credo). Devoid of funk or swing, Neu! is all
about compulsive propulsion. Klaus Dinger was an astoundingly
inventive, endlessly listenable drummer who worked magic within the
confines of a rudimentary four-to-the-floor rock beat. Together with
guitarist Michael Rother, he invented motorik, a metronomic, pulsating
rhythm that instils a sublime sensation of restrained exhiliration, like
gliding cruise-control down the freeway into a future dazzling with
promise. That 'dazzle' comes from Rother's awesomely original
guitarwork, all chiming radiance and long streaks'n' smears of
tone-colour. Something like Germany's very own Television, Neu! bridged
Byrdsy psychedelia and punk. They also did ambient texturescapes (e.g.
the oceanside idyll "Leb' Wohl") and weird noise (after fucking up their
recording budget, they filled the second side of 'Neu! 2" with sped-up
and slowed-down versions of an earlier single!). But it's motorik
excursions like "Hallogallo", ""Fur Immer" and "Isi" that constitute
Neu's great legacy, one that's only now being fully exploited.

FAUST
similarly combined proto-punk mess-thetic with acid-rock's galactic
grandeur. But instead of Neu! streamlined symmetry, Faust oscillated
wildly between filthy, fucked-up noise and gorgeous pastoral melody,
between yowling antics and exquisitely-sculpted sonic objets d'art.
Above all, Faust were maestros of incongruity; their albums are riddled
with jarring juxtapositions and startling jumpcuts between styles.
Heterogeneity was their anti-essence. This cut-up Dada side of Faust was
explored to the hilt on 'The Faust Tapes', a collage album of some 26
segments, and it's a methodology revisited on their brand-new comeback
LP album "Rien", which was assembled by producer Jim O'Rourke using live
tapes of the band's recent reunion tour of America. But for all their
avant-garde extremities, Faust were also great songwriters, scatttering
amid the zany chaos such gems as the bittersweet psychedelic love-song
"Jennifer" and the tres third Velvets Album acid blues of "It's A Bit Of
A Pain".

Once you've immersed yourself in the best, what about the rest? ASH
RA TEMPEL took The Stooges' downered wah-wah rock ("We Will Fall",
"Ann', "Dirt") way way out into the mystic (but beware guitarist Manuel
Gottsching's subsequent New Age dotage as Ash Ra **). AMON DUUL II were the
most baroque and bombastic of the krucial Kraut kontenders: imagine Led
Zep produced by John Cale with Nico on vocals and a crate of magic
mushrooms to hand. They had a fab line in lysergic song titles too:
"Halluzination Guillotine", "Dehypnotised Toothpaste", "A Short Stop At
The Transylvanian Brain Surgery". Their estranged sister-band AMON DUUL I
pursued a similarly drug-burned rock, but were more primitivistic and
sloppy. After Can/Faust/Neu!, CLUSTER were probably the most innovative
and ahead-of-their time. After a spell as the purely avant-garde
Kluster, the two-man soundlab of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter
Moebius hit their stride with the mesmeric dronescapes of 'Cluster II'
and "Cluster '71". Later, they traded in their armoury of FX-pedals and
guitar-loops for synths, knocked out a bunch of bewitching albums with
Brian Eno, and chalked up a mammoth oeuvre (as Cluster, but also solo
and as Roedelius and Moebius) with the odd gem lurking amid much New Age
mush. Hooking up with Neu!'s Michael Rother, the duo also recorded as
HARMONIA, producing two albums worth of serene and soul-cleansing
proto-electronica. Meanwhile Rother's estranged partner Dinger formed LA
DUSSELDORF, peddling a pleasing punk-rock take on the Neu!-rush. POPOL
VUH rival Cluster for creative incontinence; their vast, diverse
discography ranges from meditational, Mediaevalist reveries to
primordial, percussive freak-outs.

Although they were only "rock" for an instant, KRAFTWERK ought to be
mentioned around about here. For three fascinating albums (and an
interesting prequel as ORGANISATION), Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider
jumbled the New York minimalist school (La Monte Young, John Cage, Steve
Reich etc) with German avant-electronics (Stockhausen). Then they
staked everything on the idea that the synthesiser was the future, and
won, becoming godfathers of Eurodisco, New Romanticism, Electro and
Techno-Rave, not to mention a big influence on Bowie's "Low" and
Spacemen 3's "Playing With Fire". 'Kraftwerk: the most important band of
the 1970s' -- Discuss. TANGERINE DREAM followed a similar trajectory,
shifting from their early transcendental rock (which produced four
terrific albums) to synth-based proto-trance tedium ***. Early T. Dream
associate KLAUS SCHULTZE also did a few interesting albums of early
electronica noir.

Featuring Schultze and Ash Ra's Gottsching, COSMIC JOKERS/COURIERS
were something of a Krautrock supergroup; their six elpees of
hallucinogen-addled studio-shenanigans range from Gong-style buffoonery
to Hawkind-like hurtles into the remotest reaches of der kosmos. Also
treading a tightrope between sublime and ridiculous were BRAINTICKET and
GURU GURU; both erred on the side of prog but still afford a fair
amount of amusement.

KRAUTROCK: THE LEGACY

In their own day, the German kosmische bands were hip but not
especially influential. Oddballs in Britain and America took similar
sources as their launch-pad, but generally ended up in less appealing
places (e.g. Henry Cow and the Canterbury school of jerky
jazz-influenced art-rock). In the early '70s, only the Eno-era Roxy
Music, Stooges' offshoot Destroy All Monsters, and Robert Fripp/Brian
Eno's guitar-loop albums ("No Pussyfooting" etc) really picked up on
German ideas. But in the immediate aftermath of 1977-and-all-that, bands
were looking for ways to expand on punk's sonic fundamentalism without
bloating up into prog-rock indulgence, and Krautrock provided a host of
pointers for the post-punk vanguard. Can especially offered a fertile
source of rhythmic ideas, not just for avant-funkateers like PiL and Pop
Group, but also The Fall. Their early anthem "Repetition" ("repetition
in the music and we're never gonna lose it") expressed Holger Czukay's
creed of 'self-restriction" in word and sound; Mark E. Smith would later
pen "I Am Damo Suzuki" as a tribute to Can's second and most barmy
vocalist.

The pan-global panoramic trance-dance of Talking Heads' "Remain In
Light" owed a lot to "Soon Over Babaluma", and yet more sincere flattery
came in the form of David Byrne and "Remain" producer Eno's "My Life In
The Bush of Ghosts" (1981). Its use of ethnic vocal samples was
unfavourably compared with Czukay's recent "Movies", whose "Persian
Love" recontextualised an Iranian ballad; in actual fact, Holger had got
there 12 years earlier with "Canaxis", which used Vietnamese
boat-woman's song! Meanwhile, the then freshly reissued Faust were
impacting the burgeoning "industrial" scene (Cabaret Voltaire, Zoviet
France, This Heat, Nurse With Wound, etc), their collage aesthetic
paralleling the in-vogue cut-up techniques of William Burroughs.

In the '90s, Krautmania blew up big time. First, there was American
lo-fi: Pavement, Thinking Fellers Union, Mercury Rev, F/i, Truman's
Water (who covered not one but TWO Faust songs), Soul-Junk. Then came
the international drone-rock network (Flying Saucer Attack, Labradford,
the Dead C/Gate, Flies Inside The Sun, Third Eye Foundation), and the
neo-Neu! motorik maniacs (Stereolab, Trans-Am, Quickspace Supersport),
and the nouveau kosmonauts (Sabalon Glitz, Telstar Ponies, Cul De Sac)
and the post-rock groove collectives (Laika, Tortoise, Pram, Moonshake,
Rome), and even the odd art-tekno outfit (Mouse On Mars). Inevitably,
the referencing is getter more arcane: Cluster & Eno with
Labradford, Popol Vuh with Flying Saucer and Sabalon, Cosmic Jokers with
Telstar....

Why is the Krautrock legacy being embraced so fervently, at this
precise point in time? Firstly, Krautrock is one of the great eras of
guitar-reinvention. Expanding on the innovations of Hendrix, Syd
Barrett, the VU, etc, the Krautrock bands explored the electric guitar's
potential as source of sound-in-itself. Fed through effects-pedals and
the mixing desk, the guitar ceased to be a riff-machine and verged on an
analog synthesiser, i.e. a generator of timbre and tone-colour. As
such, the Krauts anticipated the soundpainting and texturology of
today's post-rock, while still retaining the rhythmic thrust of
rock'n'roll.

Second, Krautrock brought into focus an idea latent in rock, from Bo
Diddley to the Stooges to the Modern Lovers: that the rhythmic essence
of rock music, what made it different from jazz, was a kind of machinic
compulsion. Pitched somewhere between Kraftwerk's man-machine rigour and
James Brown's sex-machine sweat, bands like Can and Neu! created
grooves that fused the luscious warmth of flesh-and-blood funk with the
cold precision of techno. There was a spiritual aspect to all this, sort
of Zen and the Art of Motorik Maintenance: the idea that true joy in
life isn't liberation from work but exertion, fixation, a trance-like
state of immersion in the process itself, regardless of outcome. Holger
Czukay declared: "Repetition is like a machine... If you can get aware
of the life of a machine then you are definitely a master ... [machines]
have a heart and soul... they are living beings'." . Taking this idea
of the 'soft machine' or 'desiring machine' even further, Neu! created a
new kind of rhythm for rock, bridging the gap between rock'n'roll's
syncopation and disco's four-to-the-floor metronomics. As Stereolab's
Tim Gane says, "Neu!'s longer tracks are far closer to the nature of
house and techno than guitar rock."

Beyond all this, Krautrock is simply fabulous music, a dizzy
kaleidoscope of crazily mixed up and incompatible emotions and
sensations (wonder, poignancy, nonchalance, tenderness, derangement), an
awesome affirmation of possibility that inevitably appeals in an age
when guitar-based music appears to be contracting on a weekly basis.
Listeners are turning to it, not as a nostalgia-inducing memento of some
wilder, more daring golden age they never lived through, but as a
treasure trove of hints and clues as to what can be done right here,
right now. Krautrock isn't history, but a living testament that there's
still so far to go.

****

NOTES FROM 2013

* No slight intended to the very wonderful Buzzcocks (whose Shelley was a Krautrock fan and it shows in some of the later B-cocks B-sides, plus Neu-y side project The Tiller Boys w/ Eric Random, plus his pre-Buzz solo album, the all electronic Sky Yen). And no slight to the pre-psych Beatles either. But definite slight to those who think music should have never evolved beyond 1966 and 1978.

** Come to have quite high regard and fondness for the late Seventies Manuel Gottsching and Ash Ra (had I even heard them properly when I wrote this?), in fact I probably prefer the Inventions for Guitar and New Age of Earth and Belle Alliance etc stuff to Ash Ra Tempel circa Join Inn.... it's on the way to the untouchable sublimity of E2-E4.

*** Again, have a kinder opinion of the Phaedra-onwards Tangerine Dream plus Froese solo albums... and a substantially higher estimation of Klaus Schulze. The big ommission here is Conrad Schnitzler. Should also have had more to say about Cluster, especially the sublime Zuckerzeit. But you know, in those days you had to pay for music, remember? And also, Melody Maker word-counts, which I was pushing to the absolute limit with this double-pager.

**** Originally there was a side-bar with a mini-interview with David Keenan, then of Telstar Ponies, representing current bands influenced by K-rock. But the MM editor cut it for space. Shame as he had some interesting stuff to say.

by Simon ReynoldsMarginal in its own time, Krautrock can now be seen to have invented the future we currently inhabit. Can's pan-global avant-funk anticipated many of the moves made by sampladelic dance genres like trip hop, ethnotechno and ambient jungle; Kraftwerk and Neu!'s motorik rhythms paved the way for trance techno and trance rock; Faust and Cluster's drone-ological experiments contained the germs of lo-fi, post-rock and isolationism. The boom in Krautrock reissues offers a great opportunity to go back and hear this future's birth-pangs. Easily the most exciting of the current spate of reissues are the three albums Kraftwerk recorded between 1970-73, prior to their global pop smash "Autobahn". "Kraftwerk 1", "Kraftwerk 2" and "Ralf and Florian" (all Germanofon) are fascinating because you can hear both where the band are headed (techno) and the experimental tradition from which they gradually extricated themselves (late '60s New York avant-gardism). Despite the fact that its robotic riff is played on a flute rather than a synth, "Ruckzuck" prophesises the hypnotic rush of "Trance Europe Express" and "Tour De France"; the Elysian electro-pastoralism of "Klingklang" looks ahead to the heavenly shimmerscapes of "Neon Lights", or even Spacemen 3's "Playing With Fire". Elsewhere, Kraftwerk's avant-classical and psychedelic roots are showing: there's John Cage-like gamelan chimes, clusters of woozy guitar-harmonics and droopy, almost Hawaian-soudingbottleneck-glissandos, echo-chamber freak-outs, Beach Boys/barbershop harmonies and even Byrdsy backwards-guitar.

Krautrock's ancestral links (via the Velvet Underground) to New York's school of drone-minimalism were spelled out when Faust hooked up with Tony Conrad, who'd played (alongside John Cale) in La Monte Young's legendary if little heard "dream music" ensemble. The result was the 1972 LP "Outside The Dream Syndicate", now reissued by Table of The Elements: three twenty-minute-plus tracks of magnificent mantric monotony, with Conrad's severe violin rasping across Faust's strict and symettrical rhythm section. Don't expect Faust's kooky wit or surreal caprices: "Outside The Dream Syndicate" is an essay in the Zen-power of repetition andrestriction. If it's Faust's daft side you're after, check out "The Faust Concerts Vol. 1" and "Vol. 2" (both Table of the Elements), which document the band's '90s reformation, alternating between a pointless 'Greatest Hits' revue and 'old-Dadaist-farts-at-play' cacophony. Still, Faust have a brand new studio LP out later this year, produced by Steve Albini and Jim O'Rourke, which should be at very least intriguing.

Anyone interested in tripped-out weirdshit should hunt down the awesome "Cluster II" (Tempel). Cluster--the two-man sound-laboratory of Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius-- deployed treated, processed and looped guitars to weave drone-tapestries that seem to waver, bucklee and crinkle before your ears, like the sonic equivalent of Op Art. Later, Cluster went synth, collaborated with Brian Eno, and dwindled into sporadically interesting but increasingly New Agey solo careers. That said, their brand-new, percussion-oriented LP "One Hour" (Gyroscope) is actually well worth a listen. Back in the mid-70's, Roedelius and Moebius hooked up with Michael Rother of Neu! to form Harmonia, whose second LP "Deluxe" (Bebe) has just been reissued. Harmonia's aura of serene exultation is actually closer to Neu!'s gliding propulsion than Cluster's locked-groove claustrophobia. With its twinkling Rother guitars and naively pretty, early Orchestral Manoeuvres melodiosness, "Deluxe" is like some weird fusion of kosmic rock and Test Card muzak.

Of the latest bunch of Can-related reissues, the most interesting solo item is "Canaxis" (Spoon/Mute), a 1968/69 collaboration between Holger Czukay and Rolf Dammers that consists of two side-long "acoustic sound-paintings". The title track and "Boat-Woman Song" (which is based around tape-loops of haunting Vietnamese folk music) are pioneering examples of ethnological sampling. Much later came Jon Hassell with his "Fourth World" music, Brian Eno and David Byrne's "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts", and contemporary ethnodelic magpies such as Loop Guru, Trans-Global and Jah Wobble. Once again, those crafty Krauts got there ahead of the rest.